All Betterment plan fees are capped, charged only on the first $2 million of a customer’s balance.

Betterment is introducing the Betterment Advisor Network™, launching with roughly ten advisers who have complete the Betterment vetting process, all of whom must hold the CFP® certification

There is no fee to be included in the adviser referral network

Betterment receives no referral fees for directing customers to any specific adviser in the referral network

Customers who work with an adviser in the Betterment referral network pay a fee of 25 basis points on their assets in their Betterment account. The adviser can set an additional fee on top of Betterment’s fee for services provided

Fee Parity Between Retail and Advisor Platforms

Despite the frustration of customers who formerly qualified for the 15 basis point tier, Betterment Digital’s pricing establishes parity with the pricing offered in the Betterment for Advisors (formerly Betterment Institutional) service.

Since the Betterment for Advisors introduction, I had been critical of the conflict the different pricing tiers presented for advisors who chose to implement Betterment for Advisors for their clients.

I often questioned how an adviser could meet his or her fiduciary obligation to clients with over $100,000 in assets, as that client would pay fees of 15 basis points using a “retail” Betterment account, where a minimum fee of 25 basis points would be charged on a Betterment for Advisors account, for asset management services that I felt were essentially equivalent.

Today, that fee disparity, and the fiduciary quandary, is eliminated, but at the expense of raising fees for customers who qualified for the former 15 basis point tier.

Betterment undercuts Personal Capital

One other observation is Betterment Premium now enters the competitive hybrid advice market, a space dominated by Vanguard Personal Advisor Services, that is also occupied by Personal Capital and the Schwab Intelligent Advisory offering scheduled to debut sometime in the first half of 2017.

Betterment Premium is more expensive than the 30 basis point fee Vanguard Personal Advisor Services and the 28 basis point fee from the upcoming Schwab Intelligent Advisory, but at 50 basis points, the service undercuts Personal Capital’s current 89 basis point pricing.

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Now you’ve probably noticed that it’s been a few weeks since my last Bits and Bytes broadcast, and that’s because I’ve attended not one, but two hackathon events hosted by financial technology companies. The first was the Fuse event in Park City, Utah, where Orion Advisor Services assembled developers from dozens of companies to present innovative ways they leverage the Orion Notifications platform. My producer Steve and I vlogged each day of the event, which I highly recommend you watch to find out who claimed the coveted Best in Show award. And then two weeks later, eMoney hosted their own hackathon event, which had a bit of a different structure from Fuse, as four groups of advisors teamed up with eMoney product, design, and engineering employees to build new planning experiences onto the existing eMoney platform. We made vlogs of this event, too, which I also think is worth your time to watch. Now, I get that hackathons generate good PR and marketing buzz for the host companies, but quite honestly it’s exciting to see activities like these that promote innovation and experimentation with technology that’s all about helping you serve your clients AND be a better business owner.

Now, moving on to top stories, let’s start with Motif Investing, as the company just introduced a new subscription-based service called Motif BLUE. If you remember back in December 2014, I awarded the Best Back-Office Technology to the Motif Advisor Platform, but that was before the company switched from a flat monthly fee per customer to an AUM-based fee schedule. But with Motif BLUE, the monthly fee makes a comeback, as customers can pay up to $19.95 a month to invest in three motifs, get auto-rebalancing of professional motifs, and trade motifs three times per month commission free. So my theory is, customers can use the Motif BLUE Starter plan at $5 a month to mimic one of the asset allocations of the popular automated investment services out there, but instead of paying an AUM-based fee of, oh, 25 to 35 basis points, customers pay Motif roughly $60 a year. Do the math, and Motif is cheaper when assets go above about $20,000 versus an annual fee of 35 basis points. Now I admit, there are still other differences between Motif Investing and automated investment services, but I think you can sense I believe that fees for investing software should not be based on the size of the assets being managed, and I expect that trend to grow as customers gravitate towards subscription-based pricing models.

But to up the ante, Betterment announced its own new offering called the Tax-Coordinated Portfolio service, where Betterment automatically implements asset location preferences across taxable and tax-deferred or tax-exempt investment accounts. Now the concept of asset location preferences is nothing new, but what IS new is the ability to use software to automatically manage location preferences on the fly, such as when clients make one-time deposits or withdrawals across their various accounts. Betterment confirmed that this service will be available to Betterment for Advisors customers, so when I go back to that whole discussion around fees a moment ago with Motif Investing, one could argue that higher fees could be justified because of nuanced differences like automated asset location management.

And look, if you want to effectively mange asset location preferences, you really need to see all of your clients’ assets and accounts, which leads me to my final story that comes from Quovo, as the company announced the release of the Quovo Advisor Dashboard. The dashboard allows advisors to quickly view information on both assets under management as well as held-away assets, easily synchronize new client accounts, and generate simple reports based on the data obtained by Quovo. Now I know aggregating held-away assets has always come with its share of challenges (like expired account credentials), but with the Department of Labor fiduciary requirements coming in April next year, how will you be able to defend the advice you provide to clients if you don’t have a clear picture of their assets and liabilities? You can certainly get those details without using account aggregation, but it just won’t be very efficient, and with direct-to-consumer providers like Personal Capital and Betterment including account aggregation in their solutions, well, these are the new table stakes for technology in your business. So if you’re not using solutions like Quovo or alternatives like Morningstar ByAllAccounts, Aqumulate, eMoney, Wealth Access, Yodlee and others, there’s still time to add one of these to the tools you use today.

It’s a request we’ve heard from a lot of advisors: make it simple to include individual bonds in a portfolio on Riskalyze. We’re excited to announce that coverage for over 30,000 individual corporate, government and municipal bonds will arrive on October 1.

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[Now on to this week’s top story that comes from LPL Financial, as this week the nation’s largest broker-dealer held its annual LPL Focus conference in San Diego.

I wasn’t able to attend the conference, but LPL CIO Victor Fetter kindly connected with me by phone to cover several of the key technology announcements made at the event.

First, ClientWorks, the replacement for the existing BranchNet platform, is now available to roughly 11,000 advisors, up significantly from the 500 beta testers this time last year. Next, an updated account opening solution is anticipated soon which will streamline the creation of LPL account forms, pre-populate forms for clients with existing LPL accounts, and automatically fire off an electronic signature workflow.

Fetter also highlighted a new Adoption Index score that advisors can use to gauge their own adoption of particular technologies and then identify areas where efficiency can be improved.

And finally, lots of attention was given to Guided Wealth Portfolios, LPL’s automated investment solution powered by BlackRock’s FutureAdvisor platform expected to be available in early 2017. Fetter told me that advisors can choose to add their brand to Guided Wealth Portfolios as an extension of their existing business, or they can create a new brand as a separate, but complementary, platform for certain clients.

Guided Wealth Portfolios will consist of ETF allocations managed by LPL Research and they will be visible in the ClientWorks dashboard. Clients can view their information using a mobile responsive website, but Fetter said a native app for iPhone or Android is not anticipated at this time. Oh, and I think fees for the service are still up in the air, so we’ll have to check back as the service gets closer to its official rollout.

And speaking of FutureAdvisor, this week, US Bank, the fifth largest commercial bank in the United States, announced that it, too, will be using FutureAdvisor to power an automated solution for its clients with portfolios designed by, you guessed it, US Bancorp Investments. Like LPL’s Guided Wealth Portfolios, US Bank said the service is expected to be available in 2017, and fees for the service were not yet disclosed.] To stay up to date with technological innovations, the independent broker-dealer LPL Financial is developing more tools for its new adviser dashboard and implementing smarter automation.

[Next up is news on Betterment, as this week the company announced a partnership with Uber, the multi-billion dollar global ride-sharing network, which allows drivers to open and fund a Betterment IRA account directly within the Uber app. Drivers get special fees, too, with their first year of Betterment completely free, and after that it’s 25 basis points per year on accounts below $100,000.

So guess what? The stakes for client acquisition just went up, in fact, way up. Millions of people recognize Uber, and when they see a partnership like this, they have to be thinking, “Hey, if Betterment’s good enough for a huge company like Uber, it’s gotta be good enough for me.”

And for Uber, they could have chosen anybody for this partnership. They could have teamed up with Vanguard, Schwab Intelligent Portfolios, or even *cough* FutureAdvisor, but no, they chose Betterment.

So the way I see it, this is about distribution and decreasing client acquisition costs. Look, for years, industry commentators, myself included, have beat the drum about the high acquisition costs of automated investment services and how tough it is for robo advisors to actually make a profit.

Well, if an automated service can immediately get exposure to hundreds of thousands of potential customers by getting embedded in another app, what’s to stop Betterment from getting embedded in the eBay app to invest your extra cash, or even into SnapChat right along side the SnapCash feature? That’s a pretty inexpensive, yet clever way, to acquire new customers.

So welcome to the new front line in the battle for asset management, I hope your marketing team is up for the challenge.] Uber Technologies Inc. is partnering with robo advice provider Betterment Inc. to offer thousands of its drivers access to retirement accounts.

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[Get ready for the robo news, as this week’s top stories come from Fidelity Investments and TD Ameritrade, as both financial institutions recently announced online investing solutions for the retail investor. A few days ago, Fidelity officially rolled out Fidelity Go, specifically targeting digitally savvy customers in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, with investment assets in the low six figures.

When asked by Investor’s Business Daily what happens when Fidelity Go customers get older and wealthier, Rich Compson, head of managed accounts at Fidelity, responded that customers would be referred “to other services like Fidelity’s Portfolio Advisory Services.”

Ok, ok, but advisors aren’t completely left out, as Fidelity did promise details about an automated service it’s developing for financial advisers by year-end. That’s, details, by year-end.

And a few weeks ago, TD Ameritrade announced it had completed updates to its Amerivest Managed Portfolios retail offering, including a digital overhaul for better goal setting, performance tracking, and more.

In ThinkAdvisor’s interview with incoming CEO Tim Hockey, he said that the company will be using Amerivest’s tech enhancements “to launch a new robo for the self-directed client’s needs” scheduled for sometime in 2017.

When asked about referrals to RIAs who custody with TD Ameritrade Institutional, Hockey added that retail clients with $1 million dollars or more are the “target referral” for affiliated RIAs.

That comment came out at the same time the company announced a program with the XY Planning Network to provide dedicated service and no minimum asset requirement to use TD Ameritrade Institutional’s custody services. That’s good, it’s gotta be awkward knowing TD Ameritrade is going to target digitally savvy investors, aka potential XYPN clients, with their own retail robo solution.

On top of all that, Wells Fargo also announced that it, too, is entering the robo market, with a solution expected also sometime in 2017.

And if you don’t like today’s current robo solutions, you can go build your own robo algorithm with Quantopian, who just received fresh venture capital this week from hedge fund investor Steve Cohen.

That’s it, all I hear all day long is how great robos do this, or how wonderful robos do that: robo, robo, robo!]

[Now in NON-robo news, how about an update from Envestnet | Tamarac, as the company released the latest version of its client portal to advisors who use the Advisor View™ application. If you watched my coverage of the Envestnet Advisor Summit earlier this year, you would have seen a preview of the updated client portal, plus the key enhancements highlighted by Brandon Rembe. So click right here so you can watch that video.] Envestnet | Tamarac has completely redesigned the client portal in its Advisor View™ portfolio management and performance reporting application. The new client portal will be implemented as part of Tamarac’s July 2016 technology release, and seeks to help RIAs create highly customizable client portal experiences to engage their clients and appeal to the next generation of investors.

[Also, MoneyGuidePro recently released a utility called Best Interest Scout, intended to gather information about client goals, expectations, and investment details in one place. This should help you from a workflow perspective, but the tool should also be helpful in identifying when you must engage in a Best Interests Contract with a client. If you’re concerned about compliance with the pending fiduciary rule from the DoL, expect more tools like Best Interest Scout to come to market.] PIEtech, the creator of financial planning software MoneyGuidePro, has built a tool to see how well clients’ portfolios are aligned with their best interests, including retirement goals and concerns, insurance needs, and health-care costs.

Now since I took a few weeks off, I just don’t have time to cover all the stories in my backlog, including news on the talent exodus at Wealthfront, the Betterment for Business 401(k) offering surpassing 200 plan sponsors and $5 billion in AUM, Quovo, Riskalyze and more, so links to those stories are below:

Betterment for Business, the only turnkey 401(k) service that includes personalized investment advice for all participants, announced today that it has successfully added 200 plan sponsors to the platform in the last six months.

Betterment announced today that it is the first independent robo-advisor to reach $5 billion in assets under management. The company now helps more than 175,000 customers intelligently manage and grow their wealth.

Advisor Software, Inc. has teamed up with Quovo to provide wealth managers with seamless access to aggregated client financial data, which can help put together an all-encompassing financial picture for every client.

Marstone, an innovative digital wealth company, and Quovo, a financial data science company for the wealth management industry, today announced that they have completed a partnership to enhance Marstone’s digital wealth solutions with Quovo’s industry-leading data aggregation.

Today’s episode is brought to you by Orion Advisor Services, the industry’s premier portfolio accounting service provider for advisors. Orion integrates with several automated investment platforms, but you’re not sure if now the right time to add a robo element to your firm.

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[This week’s top story is all about Betterment, because in the wake of last week’s Brexit vote, the company notified financial advisors on the Betterment Institutional platform that it had suspended trading from 10am to 12pm Eastern on June 24th, citing their expectation of “highly unpredictable volatility,” a decision which has triggered all sorts of discussions across the investment community.

First, a primer. Betterment uses ETFs for all customer portfolios, and when trading gets volatile, ETF pricing can get significantly disconnected from the value of the ETF’s underlying securities. Remember the flash crash of August 2015? ETF pricing was all over the map, especially for lightly traded and illiquid ETFs.

So, when Betterment’s team identified undesirable trading conditions, they suspend all trading. And as a discretionary advisor to retail customers, they can totally do that. It’s disclosed right there on page 65 of the retail agreement, which every customer acknowledges they read by checking the I agree box next to the Sign Up button. <wink wink>

But the exact same language is on page 70 of the Institutional Agreement, and I couldn’t find anything that said trading *authorized by the Advisor* would be treated any differently. In the RIABiz coverage of the event, Michael Kitces said that treating financial advisors the same as clients “creates operational channel conflicts.”

And there’s the rub. If you’re an advisor using Betterment Institutional for your clients, when you authorize trades, you need to know whether those trades will be subject to Betterment’s suspension criteria.

But that’s one risk of using ETFs in Betterment Institutional, or any automated investment service for that matter. Sometimes the pricing gets out of whack, and you won’t always know in advance when that happens.

So on a volatile day, you need to understand that, as of today, your trade authorizations might not be processed right away, and your trades will be in limbo for who knows how long until Betterment decides it’s ok to resume trading. I suspect that policy might soon be changing for Betterment Institutional users.] Betterment, LLC, a pioneer in the world of automated investing, made an unusual move and suspended all trading Friday morning as markets were roiled by the U.K.’s vote to leave the European Union.

[My next story highlights TD Ameritrade Institutional, as I attended the custodian’s 7th annual technology summit in Dallas, and I made a vlog about it so you can get a glimpse of what the event is like, so be sure to check it out.

At the summit, executives offered updates on Veo Open Access, which now features 104 integrated solution providers, announced the introduction of Veo Advanced Alerts, and reiterated the pending release of the Veo One platform for late fall of this year.

There weren’t very many advisor dashboards available when Veo One was first announced in January of last year, but recently several tech providers have invested heavily in their own all-in-one dashboards, with notable names like Envestnet|Tamarac, supported by Envestnet’s acquisitions of Finance Logix and Yodlee, Salesforce, with its rollout of Financial Services Cloud happening now, and Fidelity’s Wealthscape platform anticipated by the end of this year, which will include technology from the eMoney acquisition.

So Veo One will go up against some stiff competition when it is rolled out later this year, so I recommend you make plans now to refresh what you know about the dashboard options for your business in the second half of this year.] A growing community of technology innovators, which has collaborated with TD Ameritrade Institutional1 to make Veo Open Access one of the industry’s leading platforms for independent registered investment advisors (“RIAs”), is again coming together to drive significant new enhancements to Veo and accelerate the pace of future Veo One integrations.

Junxure, the industry leading CRM solutions and technology company for financial advisors, this week announced new enhancements to its cloud-based CRM platform, Junxure Cloud®. As part of its ongoing work to integrate with leading platforms serving independent registered investment advisors (RIAs), Junxure Cloud has expanded its integration with Veo®, TD Ameritrade Institutional’s comprehensive trading and account management platform.

Vestorly Inc., the leading content marketing and relationship analytics platform in the financial services industry, today announced a unique partnership with Dow Jones that will enable all Vestorly users to access Dow Jones content, including The Wall Street Journal, in order to engage clients and generate leads.

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[Now on to this week’s top story which comes from LPL Financial, as the nation’s largest independent broker-dealer announced it will use BlackRock’s recently-acquired FutureAdvisor platform to power an online automated investment offering. LPL first hinted at its plans for a “robo advisor” back in the summer of 2015 at its annual Focus conference, which was roughly one month before BlackRock made its FutureAdvisor acquisition.

While the announcement sure generated some buzz, no details on specific pricing or availability were provided. What the press release did say is that the model portfolios will be provided by LPL’s research department, so at least initially, advisors and reps will not be able to create their own custom allocations.

The press release also said the automated solution will be integrated with LPL’s custodial platform, but it didn’t say if that was the existing BranchNet platform or the much-anticipated ClientWorks, which as far as I know, has still not been officially released.

So at least we now know what LPL’s robo strategy will be, but with so many forward-looking statements, we don’t know when that strategy will be ready for use by LPL’s financial advisors.] Leading retail investment advisory firm and independent broker/dealer LPL Financial LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of LPL Financial Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:LPLA), today announced it will use BlackRock Solutions’ (BRS) FutureAdvisor platform to support a digital advice platform for use by LPL’s financial advisors and institutions and their clients.

[Next up is news from Riskalyze and Advizr, as the two companies announced a new integration to streamline financial advisor workflows. The new integration will import Riskalyze model portfolio sets into the Advizr financial planning software, allowing advisors to recommend the most appropriate asset allocation according to their client’s personal Risk Number.

Not only that, both companies offer effective lead generation tools for advisors, with Riskalyze offering prospects the opportunity to determine their own Risk Number, and Advizr offering a quick financial plan illustration with Advizr Express.

The combination of the two will help advisors gain more information about prospects’ risk tolerance and the building blocks of a complete financial plan.

The companies called the integration “a match made in heaven” because both of them are winners of the Best Client Facing Technology award announced right here on FPPad.

So as a result, and I am now officially accepting endorsements for matchmaking on my LinkedIn profile.] Advizr, the financial planning software recognized as the Best Client Facing Technology of 2015 by Bill Winterberg’s FPPad, and Riskalyze, the world’s first Risk Alignment Platform recognized for the same award in 2014, are integrating their award-winning products to provide an elegant, intuitive and seamless solution to financial advisers.

[And finally, this week’s top story comes from the future, oh wait, “THE FUTURE!” as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stage at this week at F8 conference and detailed the company’s roadmap for the next 10 years.

My best takeaway for you is the launch of the Messenger Platform that includes automated messaging powered by bots, no, not that bot, these are automated messenger bots.

With bots in messenger, you can make online clothing purchases, receive weather forecasts, view top headlines and more.

I can totally see bots making their way into your technology. Imagine if you could ask your Redtail bot when you next client meeting is scheduled, or your Orion bot how your AUM has grown over the past year, or even allow clients to ask the MoneyGuide Pro bot for their updated retirement confidence meter. How cool is that?!?

And if vendors eventually integrate bot into existing services, I bet that they’ll also include message archiving and retention so you can confidently use bots without violating your compliance requirements.

Oh, did I just give those vendors a little more work to do? I’m sorry!

Unfortunately there’s no word yet from FINRA or the SEC whether your bot has to be fingerprinted and subject to a background check. Thank you, I do two shows a night!] We’re excited to introduce bots for the Messenger Platform. Bots can provide anything from automated subscription content like weather and traffic updates, to customized communications like receipts, shipping notifications, and live automated messages all by interacting directly with the people who want to get them.

Less than one month after an investment round that doubled its private valuation to around $700 million, the robo-adviser Betterment is adding a former top executive from Charles Schwab, John S. Clendening, to its board.

Orion Advisor Services, LLC (“Orion”), a premier portfolio accounting service provider for financial advisors, has announced it is now integrated with FactSet, a leading provider of financial data, analytics, and service, to offer its advisor clients easy access to portfolio research and analytics.

First, a heads up, Steve and I will be on the road later this month covering the massive NAB 2016 event, scouring the exhibit halls for technology you can use to make great videos and podcasts, followed by the 2016 Shareholders Service Group conference in San Diego. Visit fppad.com/subscribe and sign up today so you don’t miss any of our coverage from the events.

[Now on to this week’s top story which comes from Betterment, as the automated investment service raised another $100 million dollars in venture capital, bringing the total amount they’ve raised to $205 million. Betterment is pulling away from a crowded field of robo competitors, now servicing over 150,000 customers, managing $3.9 billion in assets, and valued at a reported $700 million.

Betterment says they will use the funding to grow the Betterment for Business 401(k) platform and the Betterment Institutional offering for you, the financial advisor.

But despite all the money raised and what they say about being their customer’s central financial relationship, Betterment’s questionnaire still doesn’t tell customers that they should pay off high interest credit card debt or build up an emergency fund first before investing. Oh, that’s right, customers can find that advice somewhere on the blog.

So I’ll reiterate what I posted on Twitter this week: Betterment, I hope you use the money to make unbiased fiduciary advice accessible & affordable to everyone.

If you want to read more about the latest round of Betterment’s funding, head over to fppad.com/183 for the links to this week’s top stories.] Today marks an important milestone for Betterment and our more than 150,000 customers who have invested over $3.9 billion with us. We’re excited to announce that Betterment has closed a $100 million investment, led by a new partner, Kinnevik.

[Next up is news from Fidelity, as the company announced plans to begin testing Fidelity Go, its own automated investing service for retail investors, with roughly 500 customers this week, with an official rollout sometime in the second half of this year.

If you remember back to November of 2015, Fidelity broke off its relationship to promote Betterment Institutional to advisors, and then coincidentally announced the Fidelity Go retail product that competes more or less with Betterment. Fidelity Go will feature investment portfolios managed by Geode Capital Management, all in fees at 39 basis points or lower, automatic rebalancing, but no tax loss harvesting.

With Fidelity Go as a retail offering, you should know that Fidelity told me that a B2B version is under development, and while they couldn’t give me a solid release date, they did say the offering will be customized to your needs as an advisor.

Nevertheless, Fidelity joins Charles Schwab as an institutional custodian with an automated investment solution in the retail space, but at no platform fee in exchange for a little extra cash allocation, Schwab Intelligent Portfolios, in my opinion, is going to be tough to beat.] Fidelity Investments, the second-largest U.S. mutual fund company, will test an automated-investment service starting Wednesday on a small group of existing customers. Fidelity plans to offer the service to the public in the second half of this year.

[And speaking of Schwab, this week’s final story is news that Schwab Advisor Services is discontinuing the Schwab OpenView Integrated Office solution effective July 31. Roughly 150 firms are using the solution, so they’re going to have to find some other technology to replace Integrated Office, specifically the custom version of Salesforce that came with it.

The link to the story at fppad.com/183 has the details on options for affected advisors, including using Salesforce with Schwab OpenView Gateway or migrating to a completely new CRM, but here’s the angle I want to focus address.

This is absolutely an example of what can happen when you choose a custodian’s proprietary solution for a part of your technology. How committed is that custodian going to be to offer that technology over the lung run? In this case, Schwab, for whatever reason, is shutting down Integrated Office, leaving 150 advisors with just three months to figure out what to do.

So I don’t blame you one bit for getting a little uneasy when custodians offer proprietary technology solutions to you that they own and control. But with more custodian acquisitions of technology on the horizon, I’m afraid this is a risk you’re going to have to assume more frequently as time moves on.

One more thing: if you want a firm with Salesforce experience in financial services, get your pencils out, because you should consider contacting LiquidHub, Concenter Services, Navatar, Salentica, or AppCrown.] One hundred fifty Charles Schwab advisors must find a new client relationship manager (CRM) by July 31.

Laser App Software, the premier provider of forms automation and management software for the securities and insurance industries, has announced that Advyzon, an all in one cloud-based platform combining portfolio management, performance reporting, CRM, client portal and planning, integrated with Laser App Software to enhance its client dashboard.

Our team has been hard at work creating the AdvisorQA mobile product experience for Financial Services. It provides a new mobile Content Management and Social Collaboration tool that utilizes the cognitive computing and research capabilities of IBM Watson.

Intuit identified Finicity as a solution that will provide a “façade” API interface that translates Intuit-structured API calls into Finicity-structured API calls.

Financial Data API Backstory

The Financial Data APIs from Intuit allow developers to link to end-users’ banking accounts from within their application.

In September of 2012, Intuit announced that it was opening up the technology that powered Intuit products like Mint.com, Quicken, and QuickBooks to the developer community via a library of APIs that it called Customer Account Data (CAD).

Customer Account Data, which was rebranded Financial Data APIs, is composed of two separate products: the Transactions API and the Identification API Beta.

The Transactions API offered connections to roughly 20,000 US and Canadian financial institutions, enabling third-party developers to quickly and cost-effectively deploy aggregation functionality to a wide array of financial sources.

The Identification API Beta facilitated customer’s identity and banking account verification using banking credentials. Developers were able to configure ACH connections via the API instead of relying on microdeposits (a series of deposits under $1 that the customer verifies) and a process called “fatfingering.”

FinTech Floodgates

The general availability of the Intuit Financial Data APIs opened the floodgates of all sorts of new B2C fintech startups that featured the aggregation of users’ financial accounts. These startups included popular names such as LearnVest, SaveUp, Hello Digit, BillGuard, and more.

A similar increase has taken place among B2B account aggregation providers, with companies like Blueleaf, Wealth Access, Quovo, Plaid, and Right Capital all appearing with some type of advisor aggregation fintech solution over the last four years.

Prior to the new wave of account aggregation providers, advisor solutions were dominated by four key players:

Betterment (retail and Institutional, based on their use of both Plaid and Quovo)

Note: Prior to August 30, 2016, I had Right Capital in the list above. After connecting the Right Capital co-founder Shuang Chen, I learned the company had considered Intuit’s API for aggregation at one time, but ultimately decided to engage Yodlee for account aggregation. Therefore, Right Capital will not be affected by the Intuit API shutdown.

In its press release, Intuit identified Finicity as an alternate provider of aggregation services.

We have identified a new aggregation partner, Finicity, for whom this service is a core part of their business. Finicity can offer long-term benefits and service for our aggregation customers. To minimize developers’ engineering work to switch APIs, Finicity will provide a façade API interface that translates Intuit-structured API calls into Finicity-structured API calls.

The “façade API interface” means that developers with existing code that calls on Intuit APIs will not need to change their codebase. Instead, Finicity will publish an API interface that is 100% compatible with existing calls to the legacy Intuit APIs and return data to the developer’s application as if Intuit’s APIs never went away.

Who is Finicity?

For me, Finicity is a newer name in aggregation that came to my attention last year while monitoring Quora for details on Yodlee despite founding the business in September 2000.

While the Finicity compatibility endorsed by Intuit sounds good for existing developers, there are certainly other issues to consider before building a business on top of Finicity services, and that absolutely should factor into the due diligence process of advisors.

2015 has been a good year for Finicity. We’ve signed hundreds of Fintech and Financial Institutions to build their solutions on our API, have quietly launched over a dozen partners, and are launching dozens more in 2016. Our partners tell us that our broad native data source coverage and our fanatical agg support teams are the primary reasons why they love us.

-Nicholas Thomas

So with relatively little marketing (e.g. as I published this, their most recent tweet was on October 27, 2015), Finicity managed to sign up “hundreds” of customers, launched “over a dozen” partners, with more on tap in 2016.

Is account aggregation Finicity’s only play in the industry? No.

To see what other lines of business Finicity offers in addition to their aggregation services, their website lists two other divisions: Mvelopes and Money 4 Life Coaching

Mvelopes from Finicity

Mvelopes is a software application for personal budgeting and has extremely high ratings for its apps in the app stores. Surprisingly high, actually (more on this later).

Mvelopes allows users to create virtual envelopes for different spending categories and allocate money to them accordingly. The idea is that throughout the month, users refer to the amount of money left over in each envelope after paying bills in order to preventing overspending. Transactions are aggregated from connected accounts, and transactions are automatically deducted from applicable virtual envelopes of available cash.

The service is free to use with a limit of four aggregated cash flow and credit accounts (here’s the Finicity aggregation connection). To access unlimited accounts, users subscribe to the Mvelopes Premier plan for $95/year.

Money 4 Life™ Coaching

Where things get more controversial for me is Finicity’s division called Money 4 Life™ Coaching. The Mvelopes pricing page makes the first mention of coaching services and describes how customers can benefit from one-on-one coaching customized for individual needs.

So I looked into this coaching services with a quick Google search and came across quite a few consumer complaints (36 to be exact) about the services on the Better Business Bureau website.

Most of the complaints seem to be centered around the Money4Life coaching including allegations of no contact by coaches for months at a time and allegations of cancellation difficulties.

Most complaints listed on the BBB site appear to reach a satisfactory conclusion once customers initiate the dispute process (which results in an overall BBB rating for Finicity of A+) , but it is surprising that many customers feel that they need to involve BBB in the first place in order to reach a resolution.

Also, the Mvelopes mobile app ratings are overwhelmingly positive, but many of the five-star reviews have no details in the description or come from users with no other app reviews other than Mvelopes. It’s eyebrow raising.

Critical Mvelopes app reviews such as the one below from iTunes are enlightening:

I contacted Finicity for comments and have not yet heard back from the company, so I will update this post accordingly.

What’s Next?

So what’s next? Given Finicity’s connection to awkward customer experiences under the Money4Life coaching program, how likely are the younger aggregation providers to migrate their API calls to the Finicity API? Or will there be a trend to simply abandon the aggregation of financial institutions currently covered by Intuit?

No matter what, as the aggregation vendors make their decisions behind the scenes, advisors’ clients will need to reauthenticate their usernames and passwords once a migration to a new aggregation service is implemented.

For some firms that have a handful of aggregation accounts, this may be a non event, but for larger firms with thousands of aggregated accounts, the issue could take weeks or months to resolve as all clients work through their accounts to reauthenticate their login credentials.

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[Alright, my coin flip came up heads, so this week’s top story comes from Salesforce, as the world’s largest provider of CRM software officially released Salesforce Financial Services Cloud. Earlier this week, the company hosted a live broadcast with United Capital CEO Joe Duran to demo the new platform.

I used Periscope to broadcast myself watching the Salesforce broadcast and gave my real-time reactions to what I saw, so if you’re a subscriber, look for the link to that video in my email newsletter. If you’re not a subscriber, well?

So let me cut to the chase. The CRM is built on the all new Lightning product, which for you means the Lightning Experience delivers the same look and feel of a fresh, modern interface across any device you use. Lightning also simplifies the creation of new apps, because third party developers build those apps around the Lightning Design System that enforces consistency across the platform. That’s good.

But, did I see any new features in the demo that Salesforce doesn’t already have today? No. What I saw is more data, in really tiny font size, consolidated into customizable dashboards.

Look, Financial Services Cloud is the framework, the foundation, for new features, but there’s nothing that I saw out of the box that screams “oh my gosh I must have this right now!”

And on top of that, Duran said that United Capital will be releasing a their own version of Salesforce that advisors can white label. What?

So if I understand that correctly, you subscribe to Financial Services Cloud for $150 per user per month, but then you’ll need to get a white labeled version to take advantage of features United Capital built for RIAs? How much will that cost?

And then you have a number of other third party providers announcing their own extended capabilities for Financial Services Cloud, which includes Orion Advisor Services, Advisor Software, LiquidHub, Smarsh, and many more.

I have got to be missing something here because it’s just not adding up for me. Will any of this news be enough to attract conversions from advisor-focused providers like Redtail, Junxure, Wealthbox CRM?

I don’t know, you can read all about Financial Services Cloud and the third party extensions over on the website at fppad.com/182, then send me a tweet, I’m @billwinterberg, and tell me what you think.] Salesforce, the Customer Success Platform and world’s #1 CRM company, announced today the general availability of Salesforce Financial Services Cloud.

[Moving on, my next story comes from Betterment, as the automated investment service announced this week that it is rolling out account aggregation capabilities to users of both the retail and institutional platforms.

This means that Betterment customers can now connect their held-away investment accounts like 401(k)s and 403(b)s as well as their bank, credit card, mortgage, and personal loan accounts to the automated service and see everything in one place, all for no additional fee.

The aggregation is powered by Plaid and Quovo, which, if you follow me on Twitter, the latter is a partnership I tipped my hand about back in November. Is this the part where I brag about my predictions? That’s right, that’s not my style.

Anyway, this doesn’t outright replace other PFM services like Mint.com, YNAB, Personal Capital, or LearnVest because those services aggregate individual transactions, where Betterment aggregates only balance and holding information. Well, at least for now.

But it does mean that more and more investors are going to expect to see all their assets and liabilities in one place. If you’re not using solutions like Morningstar ByAllAccounts, eMoney, Wealth Access, Aqumulate, Quovo, or Yodlee inside of MoneyGuide Pro, well, you’re at a competitive disadvantage.

And Betterment isn’t adding aggregation out of the kindness of their heart. It’s totally an asset gathering strategy because they’re telling customers they have too much idle cash sitting in a bank account or the mutual funds held in a brokerage account have high fees.

Oh, I can only imagine what those pop ups might look like. That reminds me, click to pop up to sign up for the FPPad newsletter!

Alright, alright, that’s enough snark for one episode, so let me wrap up by saying this. You are in a technology arms race, and I want you to keep reinvesting in your business and adding the right technology, which is why I make FPPad Bits and Bytes to keep you up to speed.] Now when your clients sync their outside accounts with Betterment Institutional, you can see details about all of their investments, including fund allocations, holdings, fees, and cash.

To help people identify new ways to save for retirement and change problematic spending behaviors before it’s too late, Personal Capital, the leading online financial advisory firm, has issued its inaugural Spend Report.

[This week’s top story features Betterment, as the automated investment service announced the official launch of Betterment for Business, the company’s 401(k) plan for employers.

Earlier this month, Betterment for Business received a very strong endorsement from the founder of a start-up called Estimize, saying the plan was so easy to set up that it could potentially crush the 401(k) industry.

With plan fees ranging from 60 basis points all the way down to 10 basis points for billion-dollar plans, and an interface built for ease of use, Betterment’s offering might actually be one that you recommend to your small business-owner clients, and you might even consider it for your own company’s 401(k) needs.

Among large 401(k) plans, established providers like Vanguard, Fidelity, and Financial Engines have a sizable advantage, but underserved companies establishing their first 401(k) plan should see Betterment as a very attractive solution.

This reminds me of how Betterment targeted young underserved investors back in 2010… huh.] Betterment, the largest automated investing service, today announced the official launch of Betterment for Business. The new 401(k) platform, which uses smarter technology and includes personalized investment advice for all plan participants, is now live for a charter group of plan sponsors and participants.

Started our 401K plan for @Estimize with @betterment today, was so easy to set up, amazing product, gonna crush that industry

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